About

I'm an Argentine sociologist, labor educator, and Assistant Professor in the School for Workers, Department of Labor Education, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where I'm also affiliated faculty in Sociology, Community and Environmental Sociology, and Chican@ & Latin@ Studies, and serve as Director of Labor, Migration, and Community Engaged Research for the 4W Initiative.

My work is held together by a single commitment: understanding and advancing the collective power of working people — particularly those whose labor sustains our food systems and whose lives are shaped by migration, racial capitalism, and the ongoing reorganization of social reproduction.

I came to this work through politics before academia. After studying Political Science at the University of Buenos Aires, I spent three years doing public policy evaluation for Argentina's federal government. I earned my Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Oregon in 2022. My dissertation, The Hands That Feed Us, drew on more than seventy in-depth interviews and years of fieldwork with Latinx workers in fruit, vegetable, and fish processing and meatpacking plants in the Pacific Northwest, and followed three campaigns in which workers organized collectively during the COVID-19 pandemic. From that research came the concept at the center of my scholarship: endemic precarity — a multi-scalar regime of embodied harm that operates simultaneously across the workplace, the community, and immigration policy.

Before joining the faculty, I was the Anna Julia Cooper Postdoctoral Fellow in Labor Education at UW–Madison and a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. My research has appeared in Agriculture and Human Values, ILR Review, Sociological Perspectives, Labor Studies Journal, and The Journal of Peasant Studies, alongside policy reports with the Economic Policy Institute, the Urban Institute, and state agencies. I publish in Spanish and English, in academic and popular venues alike, because research about working people should reach the communities whose lives it engages.

I work through community-based participatory action research: designing projects with workers and their organizations, not about them. My partners have included Trabajadores Unidos por la Justicia, PCUN, UFCW locals, SEIU, BCTGM Local 114, and — in Wisconsin — Voces de la Frontera, Worker Justice Wisconsin, and the Wisconsin Farmworkers Coalition. I also bring direct union experience, having served as an officer in my graduate employee union and in AFT–Oregon's statewide council.

When I'm not on a farm, in a plant parking lot, or in a classroom, I'm probably cooking, reading, or planning the next workshop.